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Big Ideas, Web 2.0 Questions, and Feeling out Features

So, in my previous post, I talked about the whole concept of the “next big idea” and how sometimes, it’s just not all it’s cracked up to be. Well, no sooner did I post that (well, okay – so it was a few days later) was I thinking about things, and a conversation with someone else online happened to spark something in my mind and an idea was formed.

No, it’s not anything that’s going to change the way that the web works, but it just might help out some of the podcasters out there. As we all know (well, those of us that listen to podcasts), ads/promos are becoming more and more prevolent in the shows we’re listening to. There are some that are paid ads, but on the whole, the ones that I hear are played because the podcaster wants his/her listeners to hear it. Upon poking around, I noticed that there really wasn’t much in the way of a network for these promos out there, and there really wasn’t an easy way for other podcasters to find/download them without having to email them all over or go to the podcast’s site and grab them.

Enter crosspod.net.

CrossPod isn’t anything amazing – in fact, I almost hope it never really evolves much beyond a nice, simple, clean app to oraganize podcast promos and make it easy for people to find what they need. The basic idea is pretty simple – you create an account, you upload your promos, you tag them with relevant information (tags/description/title) which makes them availible to anyone out there. I haven’t decided if I want people to have to create an account to get to download the promos or not, but that’s a bit out. Right now, I’m still getting the rough bits of it down and a new interface is being worked up…

Of course, a little shameless self-promotion never hurt anyone, but there is a motivation behind the message here. Once I fleshed out the concept of the site a bit and got to where I had a good feel for where it was going, I strated thinking about some of the new technologies that are out there and how they might help make the site even more functional. Sure, it’ll have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to for each of the users (showing their latest promo information), and a tag-based search/RSS to allow for even more flexibility, but what else is there. How can I apply the “no walled gardens” approach to a site like this? Is there something more “Web 2.0″-ey that I can do with the information that it would collect?

I’ve made the site with the concept in mind of “do one thing, and do it well” – I’ve had my share of sites that just try to do too much – and it’s harder than one might think. You start working up a site and you naturally want to start adding features upon features, hoping that maybe your users/visitors will really like it and it’ll make the site really take off. Honestly, I’m really starting to wonder if it’s about featuresets anymore…so many of the new “Web 2.0″ sites just offer simple things – to-do lists, social bookmarking, etc – and they’ve launched a new breed of application on the web.